Acute effects of neuromuscular electrical stimulation on lactate, IGF-1 and cognition in chronic spinal cord injury: A pilot randomized cross-over study

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at IGF-1 LR3.

Individuals with spinal cord injuries (SCI) exhibit an accelerated age-related cognitive decline compared to healthy individuals, even after adjusting for mood factors and concomitant traumatic brain injury.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Participants randomly underwent a single session of 30 or 60-minute NMES.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, crossover and pilot study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got IGF-1 LR3 and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

In the crossover set-up each of the participants took both IGF-1 LR3 and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger IGF-1 LR3 study would be practical.

Twenty-two individuals with chronic SCI participated in a randomized cross-over study, receiving NMES on one of both visits.

Lactate, IGF-1 levels and processing speed on the Symbol Digit Modalities test (SDMT) were tested before, immediately after and 30 minutes after intervention or 60 minutes rest.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Spinal Cord Injuries, Insulin-Like Growth Factor I, Pilot Projects, Lactic Acid, Electric Stimulation Therapy, Cognition and Processing Speed.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Cognitive aging, Myokines, Neuromuscular electrical stimulation and spinal cord injury.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, crossover and pilot study of IGF-1 LR3.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2026 (The journal of spinal cord medicine), a journal based in England.

More context: the IGF-1 LR3 compound page, all human trials.